Faculty Spotlight: Trained in Studying Foreign Cultures, This Professor Is at Home in a Classroom

In the U.S., Tidey has lived in Los Angeles, Princeton, New Jersey, and New York. She thought she had a sense of America through exposure to U.S. media and culture, a sense she said foreigners frequently exhibit.

“But this faux familiarity is very misplaced,” she said. “It simplifies the great complexity and diversity of this country and reduces its many different people and their fascinating backgrounds to sometimes easy-to-grasp stereotypes. The time I spent in the U.S. quickly disabused me of this faux sense of familiarity.”

Tidey documents strange or novel encounters to understand the world around her and teaches her students to do the same.

“This emphasis on combining elements of learning with elements of doing is something I find important in teaching,” Tidey said. “We all learn or ‘get things’ in different ways. For some people, things come together through book learning or listening to lectures. For others, things start to click when you put them in a practical context.”

Richard Handler, director of graduate studies in the anthropology department says, “it’s not an accident that she’s an excellent teacher.”

“She has learned different ways to lecture, to attend to students’ differing styles of learning,” Handler said. “She alternates theoretical explanations with real-life examples and illustrations and includes audio-visual materials to offer further elaboration in different formats.”  

Tidey was introduced to anthropology as a 16-year-old geography student, but her teacher discouraged her, saying there were no jobs. When she got to college, Tidey considered psychology, law and other fields until one evening she walked in on an anthropology talk. She deluded herself that she would only get one degree in anthropology and then move on. She stayed through a doctorate and post-doctoral work. 

For her fieldwork, Tidey examined corruption in Kupang, Indonesia, on the island of Timor. The mayor, just elected on an anti-corruption ticket, gave her an all-access backstage pass to his departments to examine “corruption.”

She found what seemed black and white was really shifting greys, with disagreement on what was “bad” and what helped people when the government was the primary employer. Residents did not see cheating on expense reports or hiring relatives for public jobs as “corruption” as much as helping people. There were a variety of euphemisms for bribes, including “thank you money” or “bus money.”

Tidey wrote a book, “Ethics or the Right Thing? Corruption, Care and Family in an Age of Good Governance.” To help Indonesians, she insisted the publisher make it available online for free in Indonesia. 

“A bunch of higher level young civil servants and politicians and university lecturers started a reading group around my book,” she said. “Their conclusion was, ‘We need to hide this book from career politicians or future mayors because now they’ll learn how to be corrupt.’ That is not at all what I think the book was about.”

Tidey, who came to UVA seven years ago, enjoys mixing teaching with her research.

“I like both, but neither of them should last for too long,” she said. “I like the fact that I can teach for two semesters and then can spend a fairly long summer doing the research and the writing, but then I’m excited to talk about it. If I had to do either one for too long, then I’d probably get a little bit bored, fed up and stop feeling either the spark of research or the spark of teaching.”